CSO reports: India’s hill state of Uttarakhand’s entire IT infrastructure came to a standstill on Friday after malware was detected on systems at the State Data Center. The shutdown impacted several critical services, including government websites, the Chief Minister’s helpline, and land registration services. Officials, suspecting a cyberattack, launched an investigation into the breach, while…
Academic paper suggests governments should attack public blockchains
Vince Quill reports: An academic paper titled: “Reconciliation of Anti-Money Laundering Instruments and European Data Protection Requirements in Permissionless Blockchain Spaces” published in the Journal of Cybersecurity suggests that governments should target cryptocurrencies — especially privacy preserving chains — to combat money laundering. The author of the paper outlined several methods of undermining trust in permissionless blockchains including 51%…
MoneyGram: No evidence ransomware is behind recent cyberattack
Lawrence Abrams reports: Payment platform MoneyGram says there is no evidence that ransomware is behind a recent cyberattack that led to a five-day outage in September. MoneyGram is an American payment and money transfer platform that allows people to send and receive money through an extensive network of 350,000 physical locations in 200 countries or via…
‘Light at end of tunnel’ for London NHS after June cyber attack
Inside Croydon provides an update on the devastating ransomware attack by Qilin that targeted an NHS service provider: Four months after a malicious cyber attack on IT systems serving major hospitals in south London, the NHS says that it is in “the final stages of recovery” and “nearly all services are now up and running”….
HHS Office for Civil Rights Imposes a $240,000 Civil Monetary Penalty Against Providence Medical Institute in HIPAA Ransomware Cybersecurity Investigation
In April 20218, DataBreaches reported a ransomware incident in February 2018 that had affected 81,550 patients of the Center for Orthopaedic Specialists (COS) – Providence Medical Institute (PMI) in California. The entity’s notification at the time indicated that patients’ names, dates of birth, details about medical records, and Social Security numbers had been involved in the…
White House official says insurance companies must stop funding ransomware payments, but that’s not an official directive
Alexander Martin reports: Insurance companies must stop issuing policies that incentivize making extortion payments in ransomware attacks, a senior White House official said on Friday. The call for the practice to end, which was made without any indication the White House was formally proposing to ban the practice, follows the fourth annual International Counter Ransomware…